POLITICO Nightly: Tesla’s Elon Musk problem
By Charlie Mahtesian and Calder McHugh Presented by Elon Musk speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House today. | Al Drago/Bloomberg BEAR MARKET — You wouldn’t know it from the frenetic, high profile he currently cuts in Washington, but tech mogul Elon Musk has lost more than $100 billion in net worth since mid-December. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, the share price of the high-flying electric car company he leads, Tesla, climbed to a high of roughly $480 per share. But it has since cratered to under $300. Shares dropped another 4 percent today, to close at $290.80 per share. For Musk, the world’s richest man and Tesla’s largest shareholder, those are just paper losses. He owns and runs several other companies — among them SpaceX, Twitter, and artificial intelligence startup xAI — so Tesla’s recent decline is just a flesh wound. But the largely parallel timeline between Tesla’s nosedive and Musk’s rise as something ...